Early on in I, Tonya, a character describes Tonya Harding as being “like America”—as in, a handful, but also a force of nature that demands respect. Filled with voiceover, direct address to the camera, and occasional freeze-frames on its most dramatic moments, I, Tonya frequently risks that kind of over-explanation as it recounts one of the most famous tabloid stories of the 90s, a saga that has been explained to death over the past two decades. But, yes: like America, Tonya Harding continues to fascinate—particularly as played by a gripping and forceful Margot Robbie, who commands a film that sometimes feels like a mad dash through a story so absurd and tawdry it just has to be true.

Robbie plays Harding from ages 15 to 47, through fights and tears and triple axels and multiple awful wigs. Robbie doesn’t look quite enough like Harding to transform into her, but the brutal, bitter energy she brings defines the film, from the moment she skates into frame as 15-year-old Harding and hip-checks another girl on the ice. Raised by an acid-tongued single mother (Allison Janney—much more on her later) in a part of Portland, Oregon that’s more Winter’s Bone than Portlandia, Tonya says from the start she’s a redneck, and proud of it. But she’s also been skating since she was three years old, and constantly looking upward into a genteel world—represented by her impeccably coiffed skating coach (Julianne Nicholson) —that, no matter how much talent she shows, just doesn’t want to let her in.

I, Tonya begins with a title card that promises a film based on “irony-free, wildly contradictory” interviews with the major players in Tonya’s life, particularly about the 1994 attack on Nancy Kerrigan that was cooked up by Tonya’s ex-husband Jeff Gillolly (Sebastian Stan) and three ludicrously dumb friends. Those present-day interviews are re-created documentary style. Director Craig Gillespie gleefully toggles between them and the main story, while also allowing his characters to continue talking to the camera. (“He beat the shit out of me,” Tonya tells us about Jeff, as we watch him slam her face into a glass picture frame.)

Video: How Margot Robbie Transformed Into Tonya Harding

All that flourish, plus a soundtrack jam-packed with 80s hair metal, gives I, Tonya a busy energy that can’t help but flag as the story unfolds—and often risks overshadowing its excellent, quieter moments, when the characters stop trying to explain themselves and just get down to the business of being. Its tonal shifts can also be jarring, particularly when depicting Tonya’s abuse at the hands of both her mother and husband.

But Tonya Harding is a series of human tonal shifts. The film’s present-day interviews, remarkably similar to the ones seen in the 2014 30 for 30 documentary The Price of Gold, show a woman resigned to her fate as a tabloid spectacle, amused by her lingering fame, and furious about the terrible hand she drew. As summed up by a Hard Copy producer played by (who else?) a spray-tanned Bobby Cannavale, Tonya’s story—and especially the Kerrigan attack—is full of laughable dolts. There’s no retelling it without a level of comedy or outright farce. But I, Tonya, in no small part thanks to Robbie’s fearsome performance, still maintains the raw, broken, human story at its center. The close-ups of Robbie’s face in the skating scenes (accomplished with occasionally sketchy face-replacement CGI) say it all: there are fleeting moments of victory that feel like everything, and then a whole lot of garbage surrounding it.

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I, Tonya debuted at Toronto on Friday night without a distributor in place; speculation about a possible bidding war after the effusive debut screening soon followed. The film is not as obvious an awards play as much of the TIFF lineup, with its commitment to dark comedy and lack of clear resolution. (Its message might best be summed up as “Fuck you, I’m still here.”) But I, Tonya features two powerful performances that should continue to drive conversation: those of Robbie, who may be showing us her remarkable power only four years after breaking out in The Wolf of Wall Street, and Allison Janney, who leaps fearlessly into a character as direly unsympathetic as any movie villain, then makes her hilarious.

Essentially an expanded, darker version of her bawdy trailer park character in Drop Dead Gorgeous, Janney’s LaVona is, in her own way, a classic stage mom. She pushes her daughter, puts all her money into her career, and waits rinkside—cigarette and whiskey flask in hand—to watch her every move. But she also hits, and berates, and in one pin-drop scene throws a steak knife at her daughter. She never smiles, or softens, or even allows that what she did is beyond the tough love that any kid needs sometimes. She also drops profane one-liners that bring the house down. The scenes in which Robbie and Janney go at each other, or even glare at one another from across the ice, are the most powerful in I, Tonya, and there are far too few of them. But while the film sometimes feels busy and scattered, Janney and Robbie are vivid anchors, diving into the kind of complicated, boundary-pushing characters that, let’s face it, are usually the domain of men onscreen.

With its Shakespeare-lite title and the mere sight of Robbie in puffed-up bangs, I, Tonya risks looking like a mockery of its subject, a woman it depicts being beaten and disrespected for her entire life. More than a few critics here in Toronto have already argued that it’s complicit in Harding’s continued cultural defamation. But when Robbie’s performance works—and how can it not?—it lets you into Harding’s view of her own life, comedy and tragedy irrevocably intertwined. It’s O.K. to laugh, and maybe eventually cry. It’s what Tonya would do.